So I discovered Code School a few years back, maybe around 2010 or 2011. At that time, I was much more into Microsoft technologies than Ruby or anything open source. Since I am learningRuby I try and find as many good sources of information that will help me to learn Ruby but will also help me to grow as a developer. Being in technology means trying to keep up to date with the latest frameworks, languages and techniques that come out, this is pretty difficult when you have a full-time job and a family.

I watched the first Feature Focus with Gregg Pollack and Carlos Souza last week, at that point I made a decision that I would sign up for Code School and at $29 a month it won’t make a massive dent in my pocket ;). Feature Focus walks you through implementing features that are in Basecamp, upon completion of these features Gregg and Carlos present their solution to David Heinemeier Hansson, the Founder and CTO of Basecamp (and creator of Ruby on Rails), who provides feedback on their feature implementation. I find it pretty invaluable as someone very new to Ruby and Rails to see how these veterans implement solutions and how David the father of Rails gives some great feedback that can be used in any language and web framework.

The way Code School is structured down paths to learning specific skills. They have paths covering Ruby, HTML/CSS, JavaScript and iOS. Each path has at last six courses covering various topics, and they include exercises. If I have learned anything in my time as a developer, there is no better way to learn then by doing. There is even an electives path that has a bunch of courses dealing with the R programming language, Git, Chrome DevTools and various other topics.

At the moment, I am obviously most interested in the Ruby track which deals with the Ruby language, Rails and Testing. My experience, thus far, just wow! The presenters are all knowledgeable, and they get the point across very well. I also appreciate that after each course there is an outro video with more info on what the next steps are.

If Ruby is a programming language created for developer happiness then, Code School is a learning site created for utter learner joy!

Gregg and team keep up the good work!

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My name is Deon Heyns and I am a developer learning things and documenting them in realtime. Python, Ruby, Scala, .NET, and Groovy are all languages I have written code in. I appeared in the New York Post once. I host my code up at GitHub and Bitbucket so have a look at my code, fork it and send those pull requests.